Once regarded as the hardiest UC medical campus in a punishing health care economy, UCLA Medical Center in two years has seen its net income plunge $50 million and bottom out at close to zero. A decade of ever-slimmer payments from managed care plans, a Medicare crash diet prescribed by the federal government and the rising costs of labor and drugs have taken an ugly toll on one of the nation's premier medical institutions, administrators say.

UCLA will rename its renowned medical center after Ronald Reagan as soon as friends of the former president fulfill a pledge to donate $150 million to help rebuild the hospital, which was damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, officials announced Wednesday. Reagan supporters have already raised $80 million for the eight-story building, designed by celebrated architect I.M. Pei, and for a separate Reagan library foundation.

Adam Litwin always wanted to be a surgeon, prosecutors say, and for six months last year he managed to pull off the most successful operation of his life. Armed with a few of his favorite props--a monogrammed lab coat, X-rays, a stethoscope around his neck--the 27-year-old Woodland Hills resident bamboozled scores of doctors at bustling UCLA Medical Center, authorities say.

Police are investigating the death early Wednesday of a UCLA Medical Center patient who plummeted five stories from an open-air stairway landing. The woman, 31, was a patient in the hospital's intensive care unit. David Langness, a medical center spokesman, said the woman apparently wandered from the sixth-floor unit around 6:30 a.m., and was discovered moments later lying on a roof below the landing. Police don't know if her death was an accident or suicide.

Twisting a long balloon into the shape of a dog, Luther the clown clearly had a special bond with his audience Sunday that went beyond the normal fascination children have with neon-red hair and giant, floppy shoes. Luther, alter ego of Gerry Robinson of West Hills, shared something far more dramatic in common with those he entertained: He, like many of them, is alive today because of a heart transplant.

Thuy Tran knows just how scary it is for the thousands of Kosovar refugee children living in tent cities far from home. Twenty-four years ago this month, she was a 7-year-old Vietnam War refugee, separated from her parents and 12 siblings, living in a camp in the Philippines. "I remember a lot of confusion and being really hungry," she said. "That and the feeling of not knowing what was going to happen tomorrow, realizing that nothing would ever be the same as yesterday."

The 1994 Northridge earthquake that left much of UCLA's medical complex unstable has given the university the rare opportunity--and nearly half a billion dollars in government funds--to define in concrete terms what academic medicine will look like in the 21st century. Though it can hardly be called a stroke of luck, the ruinous temblor is allowing UCLA to reinvent its medical campus, to scrap the dull blocks of buildings with their miles of serpentine hallways, and begin anew.

Cardiac surgeon Jonah Odim, whose career has been jeopardized by a long-running inquest in Canada into the deaths of 12 children under his care in 1994, can continue studying and practicing at UCLA Medical Center, a medical committee at the hospital has ruled. Odim is free to treat patients but for now is on a "research rotation" as part of his transplantation fellowship, a medical center spokesman said.

Dr. Jonah Odim says he walked into a "hornet's nest" four years ago, and the hornets keep following him wherever he goes: across the Canadian border and over state lines, from Georgia to California. Despite his stellar credentials--his Yale education, his Harvard and University of Chicago training--the 43-year-old cardiac surgeon keeps getting stung by questions from 1994, that horrible year in Winnipeg, Canada, in which 12 of his tiny surgical patients died.

David Frazer was struggling. His left hand, encased in a plastic brace, is severely weakened. So he improvised as he made a cheesecake for Thanksgiving dinner, grasping a bag full of graham cracker crumbs in his trembling right hand and tearing it open with his teeth. His therapist nodded approvingly. "I hope my wife never sees this," Frazer, 81, said, "or I'll be cooking at home!" Frazer was refining his culinary skills in an unlikely setting: a hospital.